Some Reflections on the Future of War

Naval War College Review, Autumn, 2000 by Martin van Creveld

The time since the Soviet Union tested its first atom bomb suggests that the fears of nuclear proliferation proved to be greatly exaggerated. Instead of leading to war, let alone nuclear war, the world's nuclear arsenals have tended to inhibit military operations. Nor has the effect been limited to nuclear war only. Instead, the fear of escalation has become stronger with the passage of time, with the result that nuclear countries and their major allies were progressively less able to fight each other directly, seriously, or on any scale. Today, in fact, a strong case could be made that wherever nuclear weapons have appeared or their presence is even strongly suspected, major interstate warfare on any scale is slowly abolishing itself. What is more, as we have noted, any state of any importance is now by definition capable of producing nuclear weapons. Hence, such warfare can only be waged either between or against technologically third and fourth-echelon countries. [22]

Since 1945 first and second-order military powers have found it increasingly difficult to fight each other, so it is no wonder that, taking a global view, both the size of armed forces and the quantity of weapons at their disposal have declined quite sharply. In 1939 France, Germany, Italy, the USSR, and Japan each possessed ready-to-mobilize forces numbering several million men. The all-time peak came in 1944-45, when the six main belligerents (Italy having dropped out in 1943) between them maintained some forty to forty-five million men under arms. Since then the world's population has almost tripled, as has the number of states, and international relations have been anything but peaceful; during over forty years of Cold War, one "crisis" followed another. Yet the size of regular forces fielded by the most important states has declined. [23]

To adduce a more specific example, in 1941 the German invasion of the USSR--the largest single military operation of all time--made use of 144 divisions out of the approximately 209 that the Wehrmacht possessed; the forces later deployed on the Eastern Front by both sides, particularly the Soviets, were even larger. By contrast, since 1945 there has probably not been even one case in which any state has used over twenty full-size divisions on any single campaign, and the numbers are still going nowhere but down. In 1991, a coalition that included three out of five members in the UN Security Council brought some five hundred thousand troops to bear against Iraq; that was only about a third of what Germany used--counting field forces only--to invade France as long ago as 1914. As of the late nineties, the only states that still maintained forces exceeding a million and a half were India and China--and of these, the latter has announced that half a million men are to be sent home. What is more, the forces of bot h countries consist mainly of low-quality infantry, some of which, armed with World War I rifles, are more suitable for maintaining internal security than for waging serious, external war.